[reedjosh]

I don't care what Twitter does. I just don't want the government mandating what it does. If a private company wants to censor, then sure.

But as soon as the government requests takedowns and shadowbans, that's majorly crossing the line into infringement of free speech.

The whole reason we constitutionally limit the governmental repression of free speech is because we're all made to support it. If I could chose to pay my taxes to an alternative, then fine, but we're made to pay taxes to a government that now can take down speech critical of it.

[j16sdiz]

Counter-argument:

Government is (in theory) elected by people, counter balanced by court.

Facebook is accountable to nobody, it don't even have any competitor in social network business.

[reedjosh]

> (in theory)

Yes, exactly.

> Facebook is accountable to nobody

Except when I hop off their platform.

> it don't even have any competitor in social network business.

True-ish I like https://peakd.com/ and https://flote.app/.

They're not as popular just yet, but they're excellent distributed alternatives.

Further, and most importantly, I can withdraw my support from Facebook. I cannot withdraw my support from the US government.

[nybble41]

Even if that were "Government is (in practice) elected by people, counter balanced by court", it wouldn't be enough. The people electing the government do not have the right to use force to coerce other people (the owners & operators of Facebook in this case) into censoring content. A government or other representative elected by the people has no rights beyond those possessed by the people who voted for it—one cannot delegate rights one does not possess. And the courts are themselves part of the government. It's good to have some form of internal controls (self-regulation) to keep the other branches of government in check, but one arm of the government cannot be the sole and final arbiter of whether another arm of the same government is acting justly.

Facebook is accountable to its users. It may not have much serious competition now, but there are myriad potential alternatives which could fulfill the same function, just as Facebook replaced its predecessors (most notably MySpace). Network effects are strong while they last, but notoriously fickle.

[username90]

Twitter has many friends in the government and vice versa. So politicians enacts policies keeping twitter in power, and twitter enacts censorship keeping those politicians in power. This is completely fine and not "real censorship" since there was no formal agreement to do this, just some friends helping each other.

Either we can keep that corrupt view, or we can agree that huge corporations are inseparable from governments and reign in their freedoms in a similar manner.